Nassim Taleb Video: Says cause of crisis is because people are not rational

Nassim Taleb Full lengthwith Charlie Rose

What caused the current Financial Crisis

In near future we are going to see book shops filled with Books on what caused the current financial crisis. But you realy dont need that. Nassim Taleb sums it up all along with the ways to deal with the crisis . The Master Genius takes only five minutes to explain it all. Watch and enjoy the video. 

Nassim Taleb Video Presentation at LongNow Foundation

Nassim Nicholas Taleb presentation on The Black Swan. This is over one hour video. Probably, the longest video presentation avaialable on net. I have converted the format to 3gp, to reduce the size. Anyone interested in better quality video, please email me motasim.ahmad@gmail.com  . 

Taleb Takes Alan Greenspan To Task

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has turned his guns to Alan Greenspan- quite rightly so.

Sitting 17 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, “Black Swan” outsold former U.S. Federal Reserve Governor Alan Greenspan's “The Age of Turbulence” months ago.
So, how does it feel?
“Greenspan is an empty suit,” he told the Turkish Daily News in Istanbul, one of the latest stops on his lecture tour. “He does not understand economic life and he does not know that he doesn't know. And his book is boring. I despise the man.”
Taleb says the turmoil vindicates him once again. “Greenspan is a man who plays with economic life without understanding its basic structure. In today's world, links between action and consequences are not as visible as they were in the past.”
A major mistake of Greenspan was letting the banking system cluster, he said. “Thus, you end up with a gigantic bank and lose the natural ecology. If a restaurant does not give decent food, the owner goes bust. But banks get clustered. So you end up with one single source of risk and that is JP Morgan!”
“In the U.S., you trade with any bank, you are trading with JP Morgan. I barked about this for years, but then Bear Stearns went bust and JP Morgan ended up taking it,” he said. For Taleb, a system that banks do not go bust means a system that risk is highly concentrated.
He cited an example from another realm. “Which one has more political volatility? Italy or Saudi Arabia? Of course Italy, because they had 62 governments since World War II. But Saudi Arabia has had the same family in power since you guys left them,” he said, referring to the Ottoman Empire. “But Italy has much less risk than Saudi Arabia.”
So, some entities like Bear Stearns do not have volatility but are very risky, while some that are risky do not have volatility. “Greenspan and others do not understand this,” he said. “They never let the banks fail. I want them to fail, because I love the banking system. Finance is too important to be left to U.S. central bankers.”
In his trading days, Taleb was a legend due to a few incredible “hits.” The most legendary of these was in 1987, when he was working for First Boston. At 28 years of age, he made the right bet on Eurodollar futures when nobody else did. On Oct. 19, the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 22.6 percent, the biggest one-day drop in the United States ever. Eurodollar futures surged after the Fed pumped liquidity into the banking system in a rush, lowering interbank borrowing rates.

Investment choices:
The majority of his personal fortune today is still based on that lucky day. His choice of investing that fortune tells something about Taleb's philosophy. “I like things that are volatile. Instead of investing in medium-risk securities, I invested 90 percent in no-risk government bonds. But my 10 percent is in extremely risky choices.”
“Some businesses, such as biotech, or emerging markets, can benefit from the black swan,” he said. “The problem is, some businesses, like banks in the U.S., have a lot of downside exposure, but no upside exposure.”
The basic rule for Taleb is simple: “If you need a mathematician to understand what you have in your books, you're a blowup.”
“I trained lots of these people,” he continued. “And I tell you, my students were incompetent. I would not give them my car to drive, or even to wash. Mathematics does not work in real life.”
Does “Extremistan” mean the old saying that history repeats itself is not valid anymore? “People tend to learn first order from history. The best example would be the Maginot Line. When Germans came, the French built a wall. What did the Germans do? They went around it,” he continued. “First order thinking is like, ‘Let's make sure we are prepared for a second 22 percent stock market crash.' Because it had never been that worse. But then, the 22 percent crash did not have a predecessor, so history would not have taught you that.”
Taleb has told “the guys at Morgan Stanley” that they are “morons” precisely because of that. “They were doing historical stress testing on their subprime portfolio. But how can you do that when history does not have a predecessor?”
Then he explains his “second order thinking” so rapidly, one might think he cannot repeat these words again: “There is a past, the past's past and the past's future. Then there is today, today's past and today's future. You should work with today's future in relation to today's past the way the past's future worked with the past's past.”
“Simple peasants understand this thinking. But bring in someone with a PhD who works at a bank on risk management, he does not. It's like autism. Thus, the more mathematicians you have in a bank, the more likely it is to blow up.”

From Lebanon to war on terror:
A political “black swan” from Taleb's childhood was the Lebanese civil war. “Nobody saw it coming,” he said. “My father was telling me that it would be over in a week. It went on 17 years. But today, the black swan for Lebanon is peace.”
The black swan takes on another quality if it is spotted. “Anytime you identify a source of randomness, you overestimate its probability and commit mistakes,” Taleb explained. “Today we overestimate terrorism. Give a retard like [George W.] Bush an army and he starts inventing sources of risk.”
The biggest source of risk for humankind is not terrorism but diabetes, which kills 80 million people every year, he argued. “Our reaction to terror causes more people to die than terrorism itself. Nearly 3,000 people died on Sept. 11, 2001. But in the aftermath, many more died due to traffic accidents because they were afraid of flying.” Nearly 600 extra deaths on U.S. and European roads per month after 9/11, he said.
If diabetes is the biggest source of risk today, economists come after it. “We have too many economists,” he said. “The Federal Reserve is dangerous. So is Davos. All pseudo-experts.”

Overoptimization:
Now, this reporter was warned before the interview that Taleb was a “hard one to crack,” and a couple of previous interviews went astray due to colleagues' insistence on asking his prediction on oil prices, the U.S. dollar or the Turkish economy.
This time, Taleb answers without receiving the question in some sort of verbal preemptive strike. “Why did the price of food and oil rise so much?” he said himself. “Because the system is too optimized. A small imbalance of 1 percent in the demand for wheat causes prices to double. But if you look at the facts, demand for wheat is up 2 percent while supply is up 5 percent.”
Such vast price swings tell us that “forecastability in that domain is worse.” So, nobody can guarantee that a barrel of oil will not cost $40 the next day, instead of continuing its rise toward $140. And that is why Taleb is reluctant to predict.
Then, is there an alternative to be paranoid and expect the unexpected? Maybe one has to look at what Karl Marx had said decades ago, a suggestion surprisingly made by prominent businessman İshak Alaton in April.
Taleb strongly disagrees. “According to Marx, the idea is how to turn knowledge into action, and that is pure enlightenment arrogance,” he said. “My point is how to turn absence of knowledge and understanding into action.”
For that, the world has to wait for “Tinkering,” the next book of the trader-turned-philosopher. Until then, ranks of Taleb fans are sure to get more crowded. The world is hungry for new ideas and perspectives, a common phenomenon for times of such deep crises. And that is exactly what Taleb delivers.

The Black Swan Ideas Gaining Momentum

After writing yesterday's post" First Nail In the Coffin.......", here is another article suggesting the death of traditional models of risk management, measuring the economy. I am very much looking forward to a whole new world of ideas.

"WHAT'S WRONG WITH MARKET ECONOMICS AND GDP?" by HAZEL HENDERSON: 24/04/2008

(MaximsNews Network)

UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 24 April 2008 -- The credibility of the economics profession and its macroeconomic and risk models has been shattered by the Wall Street-led financial meltdown. Many analysts see this worst crisis since World War II as the beginning of the end of market fundamentalism as the driver of globalization. Coming into focus is also the fact that the USA is no longer the world’s lone super power. Military force is giving way to the new weapons of choice in today’s geopolitics: currency and cyber-attacks.

Even US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (former head of one of the over-leveraged Wall Street investment banks – Goldman Sachs) now calls for regulation of these reckless, risk-taking, private banks. Former options-trader/mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb predicted their downfall in The Black Swan (2007), as did former hedge fund "quant" Richard Bookstaber in A Demon of Our Own Design (2007). Ivory tower mathematicians lured to Wall Street’s big bucks simply didn't understand the real behavior of markets – as was demonstrated back in 1998 when their faulty models led to the collapse of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management and its bail-out orchestrated by the US Federal Reserve.

The Nobel Prize Committee shares some blame by its recognition of the faulty options pricing model, Black-Scholes Merton, with its Bank of Sweden Prize in 1993. In recent editorials, Taleb has called on the Nobel Committee to withdraw this prize while Peter Nobel himself says that the Bank of Sweden should de-link its prize in economics from the Nobels. As I have noted in my previous editorials for IPS, many other scientists agree, since economics is not a science but a profession.

Meanwhile, the long-simmering critiques of money-based GDP/GNP national accounts are coming to a head. These popular critiques, including my own, were summarized by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 in a speech delivered to the University of Kansas. Even GDP's creator, Simon Kuznets, worried about using GDP as an overall indicator of national progress and well-being, saying that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be informed from a measure of national income.”

The cracks in GDP as a scorecard of national progress began appearing at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, followed by the European Parliament's conference in 1995 on "Taking Nature Into Account." In November 2007, the European Parliament again took up the issue at the urging of the European Commission (www.beyond-gdp.eu). Its “Beyond GDP” debate was keynoted by EU President José Manuel Barroso of Portugal before almost 700 parliamentarians and statisticians of sustainability and quality of life. Statisticians themselves also emphasized the need for better measures of national progress, with over 13,000 attending their conference in Istanbul, convened by the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) in June 2007. And, EU Commissioner of Economic Policy Joaquín Almunia noted that GDP “cannot distinguish between economic activities that have a negative or positive impact on wellbeing. In fact, war and natural disasters may register as an increase in GDP.”

By March 2008, the US Senate picked up these critical debates and the plethora of new, broader indicators of health, education and environment. The Senate's Committee on Commerce held its own hearing on "Rethinking GDP as a Measure of National Strength" – a low-key academic exploration on how all of these new measures of overall quality could be used to correct all the now-recognized errors in GDP that economic textbooks perpetuate.

In its March 13, 2008 issue, even The Economist weighed in with "Grossly Distorted Picture," criticizing the widespread focus on GDP-growth. This "growth fetish" has long been the subject of countless critiques by environmentalists and even a few economists. To see this journal of economic and free-trade orthodoxy now also criticizing GDP-growth signals a tipping point in this long debate. Echoing so many earlier critiques, The Economist pointed out that a better measure than rates of GDP-growth would be to compare GDP per head – a much more tangible sign of progress that takes into account the growth of population. For example, Japan's GDP growth has been about 2.1% over the past five years, while GDP in the USA has grown 2.9%.

Yet, comparing the average growth of income per capita between the two countries, a different story emerges: the USA saw only a 1.9% increase while Japanese citizens’ income grew by 2.1%. This was among the reasons I have urged Japan to shift from GDP growth to quality-of-life indicators (Nikkei Ecology, August 2000). I pointed out that Japan had matured beyond the need for more material growth and could now concentrate on higher-level services and improving quality of life. Japan’s average income-per-head also was greater because Japan's population is shrinking while the US population is rising. India has enjoyed rapid GDP-growth, but its population has grown much faster, leaving more people to share that income.

The Economist is correct that the growth of average income per capita is the more realistic indicator. But, they omit another problem with these GDP measures: averaging per capita of growth in incomes masks how that income is distributed. Averaging incomes across the whole population could mean that a country might have a few billionaires while most of its citizens live in poverty.

Let’s agree that GDP has outlived its usefulness (started as a World War II measure of war production). There are now many new, better indicators, from the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW), the UN's Human Development Index (HDI), the World Bank’s Wealth Index to Genuine Progress Index (GPI), Bhutan's Gross National Happiness (GNH) to the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators I created with the Calvert Group of socially responsible mutual funds (the only private-sector effort so far, updated regularly at www.calvert-henderson.com).

Once again, the public is ahead of the experts and politicians on this issue. A GlobeScan survey in 10 countries in November 2007, in conjunction with the Beyond GDP Conference in the European Parliament, found large majorities in India, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Britain as well as Australia, Brazil and Kenya favored broader scorecards of progress beyond money-based GDP, including indicators of health, education and environment. Real wealth and progress can never be quantified only in money. The economics textbooks are overdue for revision.

Hazel Henderson is author of Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy (2007) and other books. She co-organized the Beyond GDP Conference in Brussels, representing the Club of Rome. www.hazelhenderson.com